Mobile footer menu with Twitter link

Join us on social

Biosafety: CDC Gets an F

“We are very concerned that the CDC is on the way to losing credibility,” warn the authors of a scathing report issued by an external committee established to evaluate the CDC’s biosafety practices.

In a revelatory interview that originally appeared in Nature with the report’s authors, writer Sara Reardon cuts to the chase, asking, “How did things get this bad?”

Joseph Kanabrocki, a microbiologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, responds, “I think the attention paid to lab safety on [the CDC] campus has been distracted. Their mission is very broad, and there have been a number of reorganizations at the CDC. Sometimes they have to work quickly and get the answer quickly, and there’s a competition between getting it done quickly and getting it done well. You can't compromise on safety, obviously, but there's great pressure in some areas of the CDC to crank it out.”